Review: The House (2022) (Patreon)

My boyfriend showed me The House because it's one of his favorite movies. After watching about two minutes of it, I realized I had to show him Švankmajer's Alice. So that's what kind of movie this is.

Like a lot of Švankmajer's work, The House uses stop motion to depict the Domestic in a way that's both familiar and alienating. While it's narratively tighter than Alice or Faust — they did get playwright Enda Walsh to script this, who gives it more of a British kitchen sink realist quality, if only barely — there's some of the same notions of the Domestic as a death trap that cuts off people from the world.

The House is a three-part anthology depicting a single house across periods of time. The first part, ambiguously set in The Past, feels the most like a Brothers Grimm story, following a little girl (rather unfortunately voiced by alleged abuser Mia Goth) whose father makes a Faustian bargain that lands them in this creepy house. She watches the house subsume its hosts, her parents, as they slowly lose any semblance of humanity. The resolution is some properly fucked up horror, and I'd urge you to watch it for that alone.

The second segment, and by far the best, is a Kafkaesque nightmare starring Jarvis Crocker as a literal rat who tries to flip the mysterious house. The results are funny and fucked up, and that's all I'm going to say.

Sadly, the week link is the final sentiment, a sentimental little dirge about a feline landlord who clings to the house as the tides rise around it, identifying more with the house than her community. It ends on a feel-good note that eschews the horror of the first two segments, shifting from "the house will consume you" to "this house will free you" in a way that Mike Flanagan would find a bit jarring.

But again, Jarvis Crocker plays a house-flipping rat beset by a Tory-caused recession. See this movie for that alone.